Remote clinical decision-making: transition to higher education

The term remote clinical decision-making (RCDM) refers to a clinician's role and responsibility in assessing, triaging and/or making any decision about the outcome and/or forward referral of a patient in the absence of a face-to-face patient-clinician interaction. This ‘remote’ concept has been closely linked for many years internationally with the concept of telephone triage or consultation, commonly termed as hear and treat. The concept of and term RCDM distances itself somewhat from the constraint of solely working over the phone, in that it recognises the current and possible future technological advancements being made in remote health care (video conferences, fitness devices, remote observation apparatus in the home).

RCDM (predominantly still in the form of telephone interactions) represents a strategy used internationally for managing the current demand facing emergency and unscheduled care services (Murdoch et al, 2015). This is due to the increasing population, their increasing health needs, and as seen in Table 1, the disparity in the number of registered health care practitioners (HCPs) able to meet these needs.